uzERP Blog

This is a tiny new release fixing one bug and adding one enhancement, but that’s they way we continue to roll — releasing little and often to ensure that our users receive value as quickly as possible.

Those of you who have some knowledge of our history will know that uzERP was born as the EGS project started by Jake Stride (he’s on twitter @Jake) when he ran Senokian Solutions in Coventry.

I was clearing out some old emails this morning and noticed a folder called EGS – the first email in that folder was dated 11th April 2006. Scrolling down I saw an email with the title “We are using it!!!” sent by me to Jake – intrigued I opened the email and the text is below

Jake,
Thought you guys would like to know - we are using it!!!! - EGS 1.0
that is. I now have six users, one VERY active, two sort of active
and three... well you know how it is taking horses to water. Sarah
is really starting to add contacts, tasks and projects. I think
we'll need to meet up in a few weeks.
You'll notice I'm posting to the forum so your stats will
improve <g>.
Good to see the 1.1 release and the quick responses.
Regards
Martyn

This email was dated 10th May 2006.

We had installed EGS at Severn Delta Limited for CRM and project management but needed a replacement for our ERP system. Over a beer back in the summer of ’06 I wistfully floated the idea to Jake that we could collaborate on some accounting/stock modules and build them into EGS. Jake went along with it and the idea for what is now uzERP was born.

uzERP has a very flexible built in report writer. Any table or view from the underlying database can be made available to the reports module and from there you can produce reports with multiple break levels, subtotals, selection criteria, filters and more. You can output to pdf/xml/csv or send via email if required.

Earlier this afternoon Karen, the Ops Manager at SDL, was asking if she could have a report showing future deliveries due against purchase orders with year/week and supplier selections sorted by due date.

A couple of months ago I blogged about how I could turn around management information really quickly using FOSS tools and uzERP in particular. Well… today is Dec 1st at 14:00 and I’ve already given my business partner (Clive Birnie – @positivechurn) a P&L for November – it was done by midday and the numbers are solid.

Any of you Management Accountants want to do early closing on the cheap – get in touch (mshiner at uzerp dot com or @uzerp on twitter).

When developing uzERP we’ve tried to make the system as flexible as possible for the many ‘use cases’ that our customers may have. However, sometimes something trips you up that you were not expecting.

Before I explain, a little background is required.

Severn Delta, the original sponsor of uzERP, is a contract manufacturer for certain ‘major’ retailers in the UK. As such there are a limited number of products and those products are specific to the customer and have a single price. Talon Engineering, the second biggest user, is the opposite – they have many, many products in their catalogue and a combination of trade/retail and special discounts to arrive at the selling price. uzERP caters for both at order entry time.

It’s well known that a backup isn’t really a backup until you have to restored it and is workable again. We regularly do this at uzERP, moving backups of various instances of our app around and rebuilding them to ensure that they’re workable after a restore. We also try to make our application light on dependancies so if needs be uzERP can be installed on a very basic server.

Yesterday we had our first trial by fire (literally) when our sponsor company Severn Delta were prevented from entering their offices because of a serious fire in another building on the same industrial estate. This incident obviously causes a major issue to a busy company especially considering deliveries and collections are scheduled throughout the day.

As some of you know, I’m the FD of Severn Delta, uzERP’s sponsoring company. I thought I’d share a little about how uzERP and FOSS helps me do what my business needs me to do – in a hurry!

So, today is the 5th October – 3 working days into the new month. Those that follow me on G+ may have clocked my post on Monday 3rd about me “Doin’ accounts stuff today”. Well by close of play today I had completed:

Hi folks! Just a quick placeholder whilst we ready our first blog post.

In the meantime, if you’d like to take uzERP for a test drive feel free to try out our demo, if you’d like a more private trial using some of your own data simply drop us a line, we’ll be happy to help you with that.

This is the first of what will be a series of blog posts on the new uzERP site and I can say its a real milestone.

After more than four years of development, and over 30 months in production use, we feel that the time is approaching to put uzERP ‘out there’ for all to see. We still have loads we want to do, and over the next few weeks and months we’ll be updating and releasing new features on a weekly basis….. I’ll post here the details as we go.

We don’t feel quite ready to make the software available for general download as the install is still a bit unwieldy and might give a bad impression to a first time user. However, there is always the on-line demo to show you what the software can do – plus if you are really interested we could set up a private demo instance on our hosted server so you can try with your own data. If you do give it a go I’d be really interested to know what you think and to get some some feedback so post a comment or ping an email to me mshiner at uzerp dot com.